Portraits of Unbelonging

Photographic Journeys Across Borders

A profound examination of how photographs can both sever and connect, tracing the paths of Ottoman Armenians across state and family archives.

In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians – and only Armenians – to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. The Ottoman state archived the photographs; the Armenian migrants received passports and left for European ports, most of them bound for the United States. Between 1896 and 1908, more than four thousand Armenians sat for such expatriation photographs. Almost two decades before photographs were attached to passports anywhere in the world, Ottoman Armenian expatriation portraiture is one of the earliest examples of the use of surveillance photography for border control.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel encountered these photographs in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul, Turkey. Produced as documents of exclusion at a crucial moment in Ottoman and Armenian history, in Gürsel's hands they become invitations to learn from lives lived in radically uncertain times. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the stories of the individuals in these photographs over a century – from the bureaucratic files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects, to the ship manifests that tracked their migration routes and the naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants, and finally into the family albums and stories of their descendants living today. Written in conversation with these descendants, working across borders, Portraits of Unbelonging offers both a genealogy of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today and an intimate history of unbelonging and belonging.

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